It’s rare that you can unite those two factions. That tells me the bill is either great….or it’s crap.

But let’s go back to a simpler time, then the hype was worse than the nascent bill. It was the summer. There were two sides and no middle ground. Politicians and pundits were like high school boys trying to outdo each other with crazy stunts intended to earn their cred in the hallways.

And along came Sarah, who outdid the boys and ended up laying the groundwork for a very special honor.

Palin, newly-resigned from the Alaskan governor’s office, was not involved in the legislative process at any level. But as a shining star in the conservative movement, she held some sway. And from her Facebook page, she wielding her clout like a blunt weapon.

And so it happened that on August 7, Palin took a dislike to the health reform legislation at that time. And unto Sarah came a vision of Death Panels. And she put it on Facebook.

Politifact, run by the privately-owned St. Petersburg Times, says the comment ratcheted up the healthcare debate. In the long post about the award, it details where the argument was born, how Palin coined the term, and what happened afterward.

Here’s the scariest part: Two independent polls showed that about 30 percent of the public believed death panels were part of health care reform, both the week after Palin made the comment and a month later.

It was mentioned 6,000 times in news reports and blogs during August and September. It’s still being mentioned 150 times per week now (make that 150-something after this blog).

And for that, Death Panels received Politifact’s first “Lie of the Year” award. Congratulations.

The urban legend is that famous people die in groups of three. If that holds true for semi-famous people, every character actor and D-Lister in Hollywood is probably stressing out right about now.

I went to a snowball fight and a police crackdown broke outIt snowed like crazy in the District of Columbia on Saturday, so a bunch of neighbors organized a snowball fight. The residents — young adults and teens — used the Web to organize the mass playdate.

Washington, D.C. is a high crime area. But that didn’t stop one of the District’s finest, who took time off from his busy day of not solving important crimes, to show up and draw his gun on the snowballers.

Seriously.

The D.C. police first denied that the plain clothes cop did it. Then they saw this video…